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True to form, I'm wasting time on frivolous things while my actual megaproject languishes on the back burner. But, I'm increasingly hopeful that I can replicate and make a useful application of the centipede train.
This sandbox mode test train boasts 77 fluid wagons pulled by 7 locomotives, and so far has had nearly flawless results in my pump hookup excercises. The locomotives are really struggling though.

It's up to 14 and 154.
But. Curved track is a problem.
My pumps all line up provided my stops are in a steady pattern and no curves, but I have yet to succeed with a good pump-alignment after a vector change.

Jan - main menu -> scenarios -> base/sandbox.
You can't do nukes since you don't get an avatar, but you can god-mode in all the pre-infinite research and pretty much any material/item you need via insta-pocket-crafting.

(The concrete was the result of a lot of time and a lot of bot slaves).

Baile nam Fonn wrote:It's up to 14 and 154.
But. Curved track is a problem.
My pumps all line up provided my stops are in a steady pattern and no curves, but I have yet to succeed with a good pump-alignment after a vector change.

Jan - main menu -> scenarios -> base/sandbox.
You can't do nukes since you don't get an avatar, but you can god-mode in all the pre-infinite research and pretty much any material/item you need via insta-pocket-crafting.

(The concrete was the result of a lot of time and a lot of bot slaves).

I dub thee Goosemopod, water bearer. This screenshot was before her first trek out to see the 57 million iron ore patch, which left 78 biters (some behemoths) dead on the tracks.
I doubled the locomotive block (up to 28 now) to pull the 406 wagons, so the top speed is just under 300 km/h. Didn't measure acceleration, but it's not too bad, and braking is great.

Her capacity is 30,450,000 liquid units [In an ideal station setup involving a sister buffer buffer train (which I haven't yet even started on), I could hypothetically refill her in a 7 second stop],
which (such math! much calculation!) is sufficient to convert a measly 304,500 units of stone into concrete.
Which'll pave 6.06 radar tiles (7x7 chunks), or 297.36 chunks of the map. Goosemopod is ~14 radar tiles in length.

YES! I can nuke things in sandbox now!
Oh my, this is unmitigated fun! Occasionally refresh destroyer swarm, run around with 6 exoskeleton legs and 5 personal lasers and distractors in hand, spam nukes and try not to vaporize yourself.
Too bad it kinda obsoletes the tank.

YES! I can nuke things in sandbox now!
Oh my, this is unmitigated fun! Occasionally refresh destroyer swarm, run around with 6 exoskeleton legs and 5 personal lasers and distractors in hand, spam nukes and try not to vaporize yourself.
Too bad it kinda obsoletes the tank.

JanB1 wrote:Hmm...you have uranium shots for the tank. What about these?

They're fun (shooting green), but not even close to as expensive as nukes, with a matching relative destructive potential.
Nukes are fired from a rocket launcher, and launcher shooting speed fully researched is plenty fast. Giant blast radius, and an effectively guaranteed kill within that radius. Stupendous tree-clearing capability.

Upon reflection, I'll hypothesize that at some point in the robot count/damage research, the tank makes a comeback since it is very resilient against big worms and a large enough swarm of destroyers would instantly melt anything in its vicinity and also soak up a ton of incoming fire. Combine that with the shredding power of uranium rounds (not the shells, which are more for sniping worms) and the tireless field repair efforts of worker bots and you'd be unstoppable.

Maximum Map Size and used Memory (bottom of the page) wrote:The map size is limited to 2000 x 2000 kilometers (a quadrant with 2,000,000 tiles side-length, an area of 4,000,000,000,000 quadrant-tiles). This is between the size of India and Australia [India+Pakistan is pretty close in terms of km^2]. It would take around 240 game-minutes (=4 hours) by train to reach that border from the center. This means that the world is essentially endless. [Since when is a 2 million-tile-long square comparable with 'endless'?!]
[...]
The generated chunks are mapped and stored in the player's RAM, which is the limiting factor.

My goal was to (in sandbox) create a straight track long enough that a rocket fueled locomotive could run out of gas on it. The consequence of this undertaking, which is still ongoing, was a 353 MB save file.
So whenever I save or load this map, it takes a long time for my computer and its 8 GB of RAM to do so. I haven't timed it precisely but I would guess 10-15 minutes to load and 20-30 minutes to save.

The spoilered screenshot below shows poison and grenades in my toolbar, but that's not what I did to all the trees.
Here's the sloppy but effective command I used to purge the entire explored area. 'simple-entity' is the type identified with all rock obstacles.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that generating a minimum height ribbon world would have been a smart opening move for the project.

Today's efforts have been just that. Archived the 353 MB map and made a new one with infinite x (*cough*2millionisnotflippininfinitebutsure*cough*) and 4 y without any resources, biters, water, or pollution.
With help from exploration and obstacle purge lua commands, I was quickly in a position to start laying track.
I don't know a command for that, so I instead used a crude autohotkey script to roughly emulate FARL's convenience.
The framerate is still very choppy (increasingly so, the more track I lay), but the save file at 320,000 tiles of track is only 11 MB and a much faster save.

Do trains travel more slowly around curves? Or slow down more? Is that why you're trying to do a straight track? While impressive, my first thought would've been to build a circular track that would move an item into a box every time you passed a certain point, and then just count the items in the box.